INTERACTION OF SEMILOCAL VORTICES

Semilocal vortex interactions are studied by truncating the full field theory down to geodesic motion on the finite-dimensional moduli space of static solutions. Two types of interaction are considered, corresp onding to two different submanifolds of the 2-vortex moduli space. The metric governing vortex evolution in each case is extracted explicitl y from the numerical solution to families of elliptic boundary value p roblems. The resulting dynamics are compared with those of both conven tional abelian Higgs vortices and lumps in the CP1 sigma-model.